New York Times Articles
Purple Heartbreakers
January 18, 2006
ARLINGTON, VA,
IT should come as no surprise that an
arch-conservative Web site is questioning whether Representative John Murtha,
the Pennsylvania Democrat who has been critical of the war in Iraq, deserved
the combat awards he received in Vietnam.
After all, in recent years extremist Republican operatives have inverted a
longstanding principle: that our combat veterans be accorded a place of
honor in political circles. This trend began with the ugly insinuations
leveled at Senator John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries and
continued with the slurs against Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry, and
now Mr. Murtha.
Military people past and present have good reason to wonder if the current
administration truly values their service beyond its immediate effect on its
battlefield of choice. The casting of suspicion and doubt about the actions
of veterans who have run against President Bush or opposed his policies has
been a constant theme of his career. This pattern of denigrating the service
of those with whom they disagree risks cheapening the public's appreciation
of what it means to serve, and in the long term may hurt the Republicans
themselves.
Not unlike the Clinton "triangulation" strategy, the approach has been to
attack an opponent's greatest perceived strength in order to diminish his
overall credibility. To no one's surprise, surrogates carry out the attacks,
leaving President Bush and other Republican leaders to benefit from the
results while publicly distancing themselves from the actual remarks.
During the 2000 primary season, John McCain's life-defining experiences as a
prisoner of war in Vietnam were diminished through whispers that he was too
scarred by those years to handle the emotional burdens of the presidency.
The wide admiration that Senator Max Cleland gained from building a career
despite losing three limbs in Vietnam brought on the smug non sequitur from
critics that he had been injured in an accident and not by enemy fire. John
Kerry's voluntary combat duty was systematically diminished by the
well-financed Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in a highly successful effort to
insulate a president who avoided having to go to war.
And now comes Jack Murtha. The administration tried a number of times to
derail the congressman's criticism of the Iraq war, including a largely
ineffective effort to get senior military officials to publicly rebuke him
(Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was the only one to do the
administration's bidding there).
Now the Cybercast News Service, a supposedly independent organization with
deep ties to the Republican Party, has dusted off the Swift Boat Veterans
playbook, questioning whether Mr. Murtha deserved his two Purple Hearts. The
article also implied that Mr. Murtha did not deserve the Bronze Star he
received, and that the combat-distinguishing "V" on it was questionable. It
then called on Mr. Murtha to open up his military records.
Cybercast News Service is run by David Thibault, who formerly worked as the
senior producer for "Rising Tide," the televised weekly news magazine
produced by the Republican National Committee. One of the authors of the
Murtha article was Marc Morano, a long-time writer and producer for Rush
Limbaugh.
The accusations against Mr. Murtha were very old news, principally coming
from defeated political rivals. Aligned against their charges are an
official letter from Marine Corps Headquarters written nearly 40 years ago
affirming Mr. Murtha's eligibility for his Purple Hearts - "you are entitled
to the Purple Heart and a Gold Star in lieu of a second Purple Heart for
wounds received in action" - and the strict tradition of the Marine Corps
regarding awards. While in other services lower-level commanders have
frequently had authority to issue prestigious awards, in the Marines Mr.
Murtha's Vietnam Bronze Star would have required the approval of four
different awards boards.
The Bush administration's failure to support those who have served goes
beyond the smearing of these political opponents. One of the most
regrettable examples comes, oddly enough, from modern-day Vietnam. The
government-run War Remnants Museum, a popular tourist site in downtown Ho
Chi Minh City, includes an extensive section on "American atrocities." The
largest display is devoted to Bob Kerrey, a former United States senator and
governor of Nebraska, recipient of the Medal of Honor and member of the 9/11
commission.
In the display, Mr. Kerrey is flatly labeled a war criminal by the
Vietnamese government, and the accompanying text gives a thoroughly
propagandized version of an incident that resulted in civilian deaths during
his time in Vietnam. This display has been up for more than two years. One
finds it hard to imagine another example in which a foreign government has
been allowed to so characterize the service of a distinguished American with
no hint of a diplomatic protest.
The political tactic of playing up the soldiers on the battlefield while
tearing down the reputations of veterans who oppose them could eventually
cost the Republicans dearly. It may be one reason that a preponderance of
the Iraq war veterans who thus far have decided to run for office are doing
so as Democrats.
A young American now serving in Iraq might rightly wonder whether his or her
service will be deliberately misconstrued 20 years from now, in the next
rendition of politically motivated spinmeisters who never had the courage to
step forward and put their own lives on the line.
Rudyard Kipling summed up this syndrome quite neatly more than a century
ago, writing about the frequent hypocrisy directed at the British soldiers
of his day:
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool - you bet that Tommy sees!
James Webb, a secretary of the Navy in the Reagan
administration, was a Marine platoon and company commander in Vietnam.
